How to cook a hard drive

In this day and age business continuity for your data is just as important to the small business as it is to the huge enterprise. I had a chance at CES209 to watch some execs from IOSafe dunk a hard drive in a pool (Chlorine and all) and then bake it to 1300 degrees F. Here's how the recipe: Rent a foreclosure house down the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center and bus the media there in Limos. Snap a bun

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In this day and age business continuity for your data is just as important to the small business as it is to the huge enterprise. I had a chance at CES209 to watch some execs from IOSafe dunk a hard drive in a pool (Chlorine and all) and then bake it to 1300 degrees F.

Here's how the recipe:

Rent a foreclosure house down the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center and bus the media there in Limos.

Snap a bunch of pictures of the press while they scarf down the free food

Copy those pictures onto the external USB hard drive sitting on the table

Disconnect said hard drive from the laptop and get everyone to follow you outside

Connect a cable to the drive and proceed to toss the drive into the deep end of the pool

While it sits on the bottom talk about the company

Haul it out and place into a fire chamber

Place a raw SATA drive into a tray on top of the IOSafe and light it up

Talk about the technology while the stench of burning plastic fills the air from the SATA drive on top

Show everyone the digital thermometer rapidly rising

Somewhere around 1300 degrees F carefully pull the melted SATA drive out and warn people NOT to breath the fumes

Pull out the IOSafe and hose it down

Peel apart the IOSafe and pull out the protected SATA drive inside the special water impregnated ceramic thermal shield

Take it inside, slap it onto SATA drive dock and pull the the pictures from just a few minutes ago

Repeat six times a day and get massive amounts of coverage from the press.

Key to this product is the fact that the pricing isn't that much more expensive than traditional external USB drives. The difference is that this hard drive is sealed in a special bag to make it water proof, and a ceramic thermal shield so that it can withstand a house fire up to 1550 degrees F and the get hit by a high pressure firehose. The goal is to be able to NOT have to run back into a burning house to save your family photos and/or financial information. Wait till the fire department has put out the house and then sift through the ashes and find the drive.

If the drive won't mount after a fire, IOSafe will pay up to $1000.00 to a drive recovery service to get your data back.

The last part of this recipe is to use your IOSafe with something like a HP Media Center Server or other flavor of Windows Home Server and set it up to automatically backup key directories on your server. That way everything is automatic and data you just can't afford to lose is safe. Heck, one of my classmates commented that he could avoid all the wear and tear of taking external drives home all the time and still have his backups safe from fire.

Brian Chee is a senior contributing editor to InfoWorld reviews and the founder and manager of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawai'i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.